Spring 2023 | Harbert Magazine

Harbert Magazine Spring 2023

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Are You Ready To Step Into The Ring?

Reflecting on uncertainty, we tried a whole bunch of metaphors. Sailing, soccer, mountain climbing, acting, auto racing, jazz, but boxing finally won out. Like business, boxing is a competition. In boxing, you’ve got to block, cover and at the same time open up to throw a punch. In business, you must protect your assets and resources and simultaneously risk them to create the new thing that gives you the competitive edge.

In both cases, you’re dealing with a relatively familiar setting, even a relatively known opponent. However, and here’s where uncertainty comes in, that opponent will likely throw something that you don’t see coming. That’s how you get knocked down. If you saw it coming, you could avoid it or turn it to your advantage. So how do boxers and business men and women train and prepare for the unforeseen? How do you effectively strategize when according to Mike Tyson, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Whether you’re a boss or a boxer, first get the basics down and then refine the methods and techniques, all the while testing what you’ve learned. Is it functional? Does it work? Then you’re ready to open yourself up to the uncertain, to take what you’ve learned and improvise and create. You don’t have to win every round. You just need enough to give yourself and your business an edge.

Here, we’ve tried to distill the present thinking and explore some of the ways businesses and managers are reacting to the current uncertain environment. Let us know what you think.

A More Favorable Sales Experience

Purchasing a car can be stressful, especially when it’s time to negotiate trade-in value or vehicle price. Research by Harbert’s Dora Bock indicates that simply by asking a small favor of the customer, a salesperson can ease that stress and possibly pick up a sale that might have been lost.

“Many consumers today want to avoid salespeople altogether because they think salespeople are manipulative and only looking out for their own self-interests,” said Bock, Bradley Professor and chair of the Department of Marketing. “We see that consumers, in general, are apprehensive about negotiating and they just want to avoid it.”

However, when consumers engage in price negotiations, they often receive a better deal and feel good about the purchasing process.

Bock helped conduct a series of studies to determine whether there are ways to change consumers’ perceptions of the buying process, particularly their willingness to interact and negotiate with salespeople.

Researchers surveyed hundreds of adult U.S. citizens by presenting them with sales scenarios at a car dealership or retail store. Half were given a favor request in their scenario and half were not.

They discovered that when a salesperson asks the customer for a small favor unrelated to the sale — similar to the popular sales technique known as foot-in-the-door — the customer is more likely to later engage in negotiations and strike a better deal. In the automotive scenario, for example, the salesperson may walk customers through the showroom and ask for feedback on what they think of the displays.

“What we found was that the favor request led [consumers] to think that the salesperson valued their opinion more and was less likely to try and upsell them,” Bock said. “In turn, the customer felt their negotiation expectations had changed because the salesperson had more positive motives.

“At the end of the day, the consumer felt like the salesperson had more benevolent intentions or positive motives.”

Although her research focused on the consumer’s perception of the sales experience, Bock said the favor-ask technique could benefit the salesperson as well, even though negotiations with the customer may result in striking a deal below the vehicle’s listed price.

“This suggests that the favor-request technique could possibly prevent [the salesperson] from losing out on the sale entirely,” said Bock, noting that some customers could opt for an online buying experience like Carvana.

Sales managers in a variety of industries may benefit from the research findings by incorporating the favor strategy into employee training as “a rapport-building tactic,” she said.

Consumers also can benefit from the findings. “They’ll walk away with a better deal because they’re more likely to negotiate and not just pay the listed price,” she said.

Bock and colleagues Veronica Thomas of Old Dominion and Stephanie Mangus of Baylor published their results in the online edition of Journal of Business Research.

Rural Telemedicine Use Remains As Pandemic Fades

Although telemedicine can help create a more efficient healthcare system, with improved convenience and access and better patient outcomes, rural residents were slow to embrace it until it became the only healthcare option for non-emergency services during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Pei Xu, associate professor of business analytics, wondered whether people in rural communities would continue to use telemedicine once the pandemic ended. The answer would have implications for healthcare planning and costs.

Reviewing more than 94 million Alabama Medicaid patient claims that cost about $5 billion during three periods — pre-pandemic, and pandemic before and after mass vaccination rollouts — Xu and colleagues from Auburn and the University of Alabama discovered an increasing trend among rural residents to continue using telemedicine.

“We expected there would be a major drop in the telemedicine usage after the mass vaccination, but that was not the case,” Xu said. “In 2019, about 0.11% of claims were telemedicine. In the second period, the telemedicine claims rose to 3.43% of the total, and in the third period the telemedicine claims were about 1.85% of all claims even though the [medical] facilities were open to everyone at that time.”

Rural communities have historically been at a disadvantage in accessing healthcare, said Uzma Raja, chair of the Department of Business Analytics and Information Systems, who collaborated with Xu on the research. However, government policy changes regarding coverage and reimbursements enabled more people to continue with telemedicine visits after the pandemic ended, while increasing patient confidence in these services.

“One significant barrier was inadequate policy to support telehealth use and acceptance,” Raja said. “During COVID-19, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expanded coverage for telehealth services that included Medicare coverage for virtual services, expansion in the list of telehealth services, and a change in state laws and reimbursement policies promoting telemedicine.”

Raja and Xu plan to examine whether healthcare access in rural communities continues to increase if the policy changes are made permanent.

The findings are important for policymakers because they demonstrate that increasing use of telemedicine will require continued funding for technical infrastructure improvements. Healthcare providers may also benefit from the findings.

“While some clinics may be using telemedicine more than others, we want doctors to see that there is a trend [toward telemedicine adoption], so they may want to be more flexible in offering healthcare services,” Xu said.

Xu and Raja published their results in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Coauthors were Matthew Hudnall, Jason Parton and Dwight Lewis from the University of Alabama and Sidi Zhao, a doctoral student from Auburn.

Auditors Must Maintain Intense Skepticism

For auditors, successfully detecting financial fraud requires a number of key ingredients including a healthy dose of professional skepticism, the freedom to hold candid discussions, and the use of high-quality audit practices, according to Harbert researcher Greg Jenkins.

The Ingwersen Professor of Accounting was among five faculty members nationwide tapped by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ Auditing Standards Board to synthesize contemporary research studies related to fraud risks and to communicate revealed best practices. They shared their practice-related findings in the Journal of Accountancy.

“Auditors are required to maintain their professional skepticism throughout an audit,” Jenkins said. “Professional skepticism calls on auditors to remain alert during their work for information that suggests the financial statements may contain misstatements and to recognize that things — such as a client’s explanations for a transaction — may not be as they appear.”

Among their recommendations is to support auditors who spend additional time pursuing potential discrepancies even though the additional work does not lead to the discovery of a misstatement.

Such work should be rewarded with positive feedback, the paper stated, and audit team leadership should “avoid penalizing staff (e.g., through a poor performance review) who respond skeptically to evidence inconsistencies when no misstatement is identified.”

Another need, the team said, is open and candid discussion within the audit team. Audit team leadership should support this by setting the right tone of candor within the team.

“Engagement partners should demonstrate their own professional skepticism to other team members by, for example, sharing their own past fraud experiences,” Jenkins said. “This encourages preparation for fraud brainstorming meetings and deeper discussions during those meetings. When engagement partners demonstrate their professional skepticism, brainstorming sessions are longer, have better attendance, and include more extensive discussions.”

Another suggestion is for auditors to conduct potentially sensitive interviews in the afternoon.

“Client personnel are more likely to report fraudulent activities when auditors remind them of applicable whistleblower protections and during late-in-the-day interviews, when interviewees are tired and prone to letting their guard down,” said Jenkins.

The team also warns auditors to be aware of relationships between audit committee members and client management because close relationships may hinder the effectiveness of the audit committee’s oversight.

Jonathan Stanley, acting director of the School of Accountancy, praised Jenkins’ work and its importance to the accountancy field.

“Fraudulent financial reporting is a fundamental and longstanding concern of audit professionals who work to protect the interest of client stakeholders, including investors and creditors,” Stanley said. “As accounting academics, one of our primary goals is to produce research that not only advances the academy but also shapes practice.”

Jenkins’ co-authors were Joseph Brazel of North Carolina State, Tina Carpenter of the University of Georgia, Christine Gimbar of DePaul, and Keith Jones of the University of Kansas.

What’s Behind A Buy Late, Sell Early Stock Strategy

Stocks traded after hours earn positive returns more consistently than transactions conducted during regular market hours. This effect, the overnight-intraday phenomenon, occurs in stock and equity indices around the world and has puzzled traders and researchers for years.

“The intraday return is predictably flat or even negative, while the overnight return is predictably very positive,” said Danny Qin, assistant professor of finance.

Qin and coauthors Gene Lu and Steve Malliaris at the University of Georgia developed a mathematical model to explain what causes this effect.

They discovered that three key elements — information asymmetry, the predictability of non-professional individual investors’ trading habits, and fast versus slow traders — are responsible.

To begin with, corporations tend to release important information — earnings reports, mergers, acquisitions, leadership changes — at the close of the trading day.

When the markets open the following morning, information asymmetry is high, meaning there’s an imbalance of knowledge among traders about what the overnight news really means for stock values. Thus, one might expect more losses from trading at the open against informed traders than the rest of the day.

Add to that a “predictable tendency for retail traders to trade at the opening bell,” said Qin. These mostly uninformed traders tend to buy especially risky stocks and to continue buying throughout the day. The knowledge gap at the open ties directly to the fast and slow traders competing to provide liquidity or immediate stock trading for these retail traders. Qin estimates such liquidity provision is worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

A fast trader like hedge-fund giant Citadel Securities uses sophisticated trading algorithms to execute sales almost instantaneously, taking advantage of the information asymmetry at the market open, Qin said. This technology allows them to predict short-term price movements and whom they are trading against.

Fast traders balance the expected losses from providing liquidity during the treacherous market open by charging prices above fundamental value, leading to a positive overnight return.

The other type of liquidity provider is professional asset managers like BlackRock or Vanguard, who run massive mutual funds. These slow traders don’t execute trades as quickly or know as much about their trading counterparty, but they have the advantage of managing huge portfolios, so they can wait to buy or sell shares based on the stocks’ fundamental values.

“So, later in the day after they’ve had time to properly analyze overnight corporate news, slow traders provide liquidity at fundamental values,” Qin said. “Thus, the inflated price at the open returns to fundamental values, leading to a negative intraday return.”

Given the overnight-intraday phenomenon, Qin and his colleagues have some practical advice for individual investors.

“The best time to buy is when the market closes or during the rest of the [evening],” Qin said. “The best time to sell is at the market open. This is especially true if you’re trading very risky, volatile stocks.”

As a day-trading strategy, however, Qin points out that it’s impractical for individual investors to repeatedly follow this buy-at-closing, sell-at-opening strategy because, unlike the fast-trade hedge funds, they are subject to transaction costs that would wipe out any overnight returns.

These findings were published in the Journal of Financial Economics.

Taking a hike, literally or figuratively, really helps

Navigating a job search is always challenging, but navigating it during economic uncertainty can be much more difficult. Having recently experienced that, I think differently about some things now.

At the same time my previous employer decided to pause hiring, they also announced a gift: a month of paid leave for employees who had been with the company for three years. Excited by the opportunity, I planned a backpacking trip to hike the Camino Ingles trail in Spain.

I was a sales manager at Twilio, where I began my career after graduating from Auburn in 2019. I saw the company quadruple in size as I took on more and more responsibility. This trip gave me a long-awaited chance to relax, release any burnout, and, importantly, see the world.

However, much to my dismay, only two weeks before I was to set off from the Atlanta airport, I received an email saying I had been laid off, along with 11% of the company. Shocked and a little heartbroken, I was faced with the decision to go or stay to begin my job search, missing out on the opportunity that I had been so excited for. After a few deep breaths and an expensive trip to REI, I went, having no idea what adventures lay ahead of me.

This is a precarious time to navigate one’s career. It seems that every day a new company is conducting layoffs. This presents a daunting task to those of us at the beginning of our careers. As someone who recently navigated this uncertainty, my first piece of advice as you think about your next step is simple – take a break. Take as long as you need, keep your laptop shut, step away from social media, or do whatever it is you need to do to prepare for your job search. Yes, flying across the Atlantic to hike in the rain through the Spanish countryside is a little extreme, but by giving myself some space, I was able to map out the next part of my career with newfound clarity.

Once you feel prepared to return to your job search, take a human approach. Early on, I thought I needed to give myself a set number of roles I had to apply to each week. Instead, I now think it’s better to switch your mindset to building a network and strive for as many coffee chats, informational interviews and new connections as possible. Find what companies or products excite you, and don’t be afraid to reach out to those involved. I learned people are always excited to discuss their company, industry, and job with others who show a genuine interest. Through this process, I found a company that most aligned with my interests, and I gave it my all, resulting in my current role.

Just like the Camino Trail, the job search process can be challenging and uncertain. But with patience, the willingness to step away when needed, and the grit and courage to lean on those around you and ahead of you, you can successfully navigate the path forward.

Sarah Louise Boland

’19, Entrepreneurship

Business Development Manager

Hofy

View Uncertainty As An Opportunity For Growth

Adapting and responding is the key to overcoming uncertainty. You must be prepared, of course, but how you respond to different situations that come about is what leads to success in what you’re doing, whether professionally or personally.

That makes collaboration crucial to managing workplace situations, especially in uncertain times. You can prepare and you certainly should, but you don’t always know what you don’t know. If you can adapt, however, you can perform well.

There’s a sense of collaboration and connection at Harbert. I saw it from the moment I got here and I’ve seen it many times since. People are willing to help out and that matters. Collaboration is crucial.

Dealing with the COVID pandemic is a great example of how the college and the university adapted and collaborated. We continued to serve students and keep them on track with their degrees, while keeping students, faculty and staff safe and adapting to the circumstances.

Dealing with the pandemic was the biggest challenge I’ve seen in HR so far. We worked with employees, provided resources and kept the college moving forward in difficult circumstances. COVID certainly changed the way we work, both in our department and in the university, but we were able to adapt to do it. Before entering the HR field, I was a police officer for seven years. Being in law enforcement helped prepare me to deal with situations, to be prepared, but also to be ready to adapt. When you’re dispatched to a call, you don’t always know what you’re getting into. You’re dealing with the unknown, with uncertainty. You’re responsible for maintaining order. If you’re out of control, you serve no purpose.

It’s the same with HR. There’s not a day that someone doesn’t come to my office with a concern, so you need to be responsive and adapt to circumstances. That’s the key to dealing with uncertainty.

When you’re dealing with HR matters, you’re dealing with people. People are the variable. Learn to respond; that’s how you grow and learn from experience.

Uncertainty is not necessarily a negative. Often it’s a point of growth, an opportunity to learn, to respond in a way that lets you deal with the situation and helps you know how to deal with things in the future.

Joseph Brame

Human Resources Generalist

Harbert College of Business

This Generation can Make sustainability pay off

In my first doctoral seminar, I wrote and presented a research paper that investigated how firms could outperform competitors by adopting sustainable strategies in their business plans. It was heavy on idealism, light on academic rigor, but I was proud of it.

When I sat down, the next student started his presentation with, “Now that we got that out of our system, back to what we really care about: making money.” Everyone laughed, imposter syndrome settled in, and soon we were back to talking about how firms could maximize profits and shareholder value. My idealism didn’t fade, but I learned a lesson:

Companies aren’t going to embrace sustainability out of the goodness of their corporate hearts. In a capitalist economy, sustainability needs to pay off, so how can we incentivize big business to build a strategy around sustainability?

That complicated question has driven my research, but a simpler one drives my teaching: How can I help my students obtain meaningful jobs? While these goals seem disconnected, they converge around the idea of uncertainty. For a college student, is anything more uncertain than the future? Similarly, sustainable development requires us to consider the future of our species and our planet. The environmental and social problems facing us are complex, and business solutions will require creativity, ambition, and to be blunt, smart people.

Lucky for us, young people are all of those things. The Flynn effect describes how each new generation has a higher intelligence quotient than the one before. We attribute this phenomenon to a host of things, from better nutrition and access to schools to additional free time and even removing lead from gasoline. In short, the seniors I teach today are objectively smarter than my graduating class of 2003. (No offense, friends.)

This is a good thing. As long as parents have walked uphill both ways in the snow, they wanted their children’s lives to be better than their own. Increased intelligence is one indication that it is happening. Combined with unprecedented access to information, analytical tools, processing power and technical innovations, no generation in human history would be better equipped to face the challenges of today than the young people of today.

It is my assertion that businesses — more than policymakers, governments, or activist groups — must lead the charge to a sustainable future. However, this requires an incentive structure that rewards actions in the best interest of the planet and its people — not just profit. We are not there yet, and it is incumbent upon this generation of intelligent and ethical businesspeople to develop strategies that reward making the world a better place.

The future remains uncertain, but every time I step into the classroom, I am a little more hopeful.

Colin Gabler

Associate Professor

Department of Marketing

Keep Branding Strategy Foremost in Mind

Branding is not just an art, not just a logo and certainly not just making sure to utilize the same marketing materials across all mediums. Branding is science and strategy combining to build a competitive advantage. It is up to your company to embrace its brand at every level, every opportunity and every customer connection point. Picture Central Florida and its popular theme park destinations.

With Walt Disney World, you may think about magical experiences that last a lifetime. At every connection point Walt Disney World brands itself as “The Most Magical Place on Earth,” a quintessential experience for families and magic.

With Universal Studios Orlando, you may picture attractions that push the limits of thrill. At every connection point Universal Orlando brands itself as the destination to test the limits of vacation thrills.

A business professional will see that embracing your brand as strongly as these brands can lead to better connection with your target market and stronger customer loyalty.

“Your brand gives you personality,” Kristopher Jones, founder and CEO of LSEO.com, writes in Forbes. Remember interviewing for your first position? A common question involves personality and how you would utilize it to fit in. Not all personalities mesh; if that were the case, the world — and the workplace — would be quite dull.

Similarly, your company’s brand should not be like every other brand; you must understand what makes your brand stand out. Your brand and brand strategy should be embraced fully by the company and celebrated for what makes it unique. This uniqueness is the connection point that customers will want to return to as long as you continue to embrace your brand.

A business professional must recognize the importance of setting their brand at the center of decision-making. “Ghosting,” once merely a Gen Z term for stopping an interaction with someone without explanation, now applies to your brand.

When your brand falls from the center of decision-making, the best interests of your brand are not in mind. This lack of brand awareness, a form of ghosting, opens the door to costly consequences. It’s in your best interest — and your company’s — to be sure each employee understands your brand and has the necessary skills to articulate your brand in all circumstances.

Following through on branding strategy is imperative for success. A good branding strategy incorporates what the company does well, what it can improve upon and what it sees as the next big thing to achieve. A successful strategy directs this knowledge to further the embracing of the brand.

Coulter Burns

’21 Marketing, ’22 MBA

Conversations From The C-Suite

Dabsey Maxwell

She’s been in the C-Suite for a while, but Dabsey Maxwell is no stranger to the ground floor. The CFO of Progress Bank built a banking career on her experience with multiple start-up companies. Those lessons have given her valuable insights into the elements of business success. She shares some of them in this interview.

Harbert Magazine: You were an accounting major at Auburn. What led you to that field, and how has that background benefited you in your career?

Dabsey Maxwell: When I went to Auburn, I was trying to decide initially between accounting and pharmacy because I like numbers and science. I decided with pharmacy I might get tired of being behind the counter all day so that’s why I decided to do accounting instead. Also, I like solvable answers and I like that it’s not gray.

HM: What personal qualities do you think are most likely to contribute to a person’s success in business in general?

DM: I would say as I’ve thought about that through the years, one of the biggest things is work ethic, and in my mind to be able to go the extra mile. I would also say the ability to be able to talk to people and listen to people with an objective ear, that there’s all different points of view. Lots of times there isn’t a right or wrong, it’s just different people’s perspective from where they came from. So it’s being able to listen, work ethic, the willingness to roll up your sleeves and be a team player, and openness to learn.

HM: Before joining Progress Bank, you were involved in several start-up companies. Tell us about those experiences and how they’ve influenced your later career?

DM: I’ve been involved in many, many start-ups, our last one being Progress. Early on the big thing we learned was something an old CEO used to tell me, “Be just like a public company even when there may be three people starting out.” And so that’s always stuck with me through all the start-ups.

For example, form a board of directors of influential people who can mentor you, who have been successful in their businesses and who could help you. Get an audit of the company, just like a publicly traded company must do, set up committees, and put in good procedures and policies, things like that or kind of what I’ve always said: You’re walking and talking like you are a publicly traded or large corporation even though you’re a start-up.

So as you grow and evolve, you already have all those procedures and policies in place. I don’t mean the red tape of a big company because that’s the benefit of being able to be so nimble and do things so quickly. Have the structure in place would probably be the better way to say it, have the structure of a larger corporation so that you do things the right way from the beginning. The accounting is done the right way. Don’t take a lot of shortcuts early on. And invest in the people you hire. Don’t hire C players.

You need to hire no lower than B players and you need a lot of As and some Bs. But don’t hire Cs, especially early on when you’re starting out because you must have everybody pulling their weight. You can’t shortcut in the beginning.

When we started Progress, we had an incredible five founders who started it with a great leadership team. We started audits from the first year. We have a very successful board, and we could draw on those people and those experiences as we faced hurdles throughout growing Progress over the past 16 years.

It was all in place early on. We grew about a hundred million a year and so we were on a steep incline. We started at zero assets; we raised $31 million in cash. Right before the fall in ’08, we raised that and when we sold and closed, we were almost at $2 billion in assets. We’ve done that in 16 years.

The structure that we had is the same structure we have now. In fact, we have all the same board members. We had one resign and one pass away. And other than that, we have all the same board members from when we started the bank and have only added a board member if we go into a new market. That’s just incredible to have had that.

HM: You’ve spoken about being the only woman in executive meetings early on. There are more women in executive positions now, but in many areas of business it’s heavily male-dominated. What advice would you give to students in business now, particularly female students, as they prepare for their careers?

DM: I taught a class at Auburn recently, a business class for industrial engineering. The class was like 75% women. I couldn’t believe it. I told the women, really all of them I guess, “Y’all need to get a chip off your shoulder. Everybody is not trying to offend you.”

For these young people in there, I wanted to say, “Let it go. Don’t get so defensive over everything. Don’t assume everybody’s trying to discriminate against you. Let it go and embrace being a woman. You don’t have to dress and act like them all the time.”

I told them that when I interviewed for public accounting, you had to wear a dark suit with a white shirt that had a collar that buttoned all the way up the back and pantyhose. Everybody wore the same outfit. As I grew in my career, I thought, “What? Why are we doing this?” I like bright colors. So, if I want to wear a hot pink shirt under my suit, then I’m going to wear that. We don’t have to wear a white shirt buttoned all the way up to our neck and dress like a man.

Women have a different style about them. They’re different managers. Embrace that. You can bring so much to a team. Don’t try to be them. I’m still in a very male-dominated executive ranks of the bank. My top executive team is all men, and that’s how it’s been almost my entire career. But I’ve never tried to be them. I’ve just tried to be my own person. Be you. You are a woman, embrace that.

HM: Who were some of the people who mentored you early in your career who were role models for you?

DM: I’ve had some great CEOs over the years. Cam Lanier and Bill Scott were two that I worked for early on and they were visionaries. They would see great ideas and we would invest in that company and grow them and see where they ended up. So those two were mentors in the sense of being visionaries and seeing an idea and investing in it.

I worked for Bryan Adams as CFO. He taught me very much to pay attention to detail. Again, no matter how small the company is, do it right from the beginning and then it’s easy when you get big.

My current CEO, David Nast, who I started Progress with, we’re a great team. He’s more Pollyanna. He always sees the positive. I would say I’m a realist. It is what it is. But I’ve learned to manage stress better with him because regardless of how complex or difficult a problem is, he has always reacted the same. He’s calm. In business they’re usually solvable problems. And he’s taught me the customer’s always right and how to handle high-stress situations in a calm manner.

The board would say they can’t imagine us not together. I don’t like the limelight. I like to do all the work and give it to him to go be in the limelight. He doesn’t mind doing all that and I don’t really like all that. It’s worked well and I will miss us being that team.

HM: What are the most significant changes that you’ve seen in the banking business in your career, and what do you think it’ll look like in the future?

DM: I would say two things. The biggest would be that the regulation is out of control, almost to the point you can’t do your job. We probably had 30 audits a year with different regulators that were required. The regulation is extreme. It is very, very hard to do what you need to do in the world of regulation. And it has gotten progressively worse over the last 15 years.

It’s really been difficult for smaller banks because they can’t afford to have a full-time internal auditor. They can’t afford to hire people to just handle the regulations. It’s put them at a disadvantage to some of the bigger banks that can afford to have a whole team just to handle the regulations.

The next change would be the technology. My kids only bank through their phone. Kind of the fun part of my job is I do all the planning of buildings and all of that. And they say, “Why do you even need a building?” And I say, “Well, it would be nice to know your people. What if you do need something? Are you going to finance a house over your phone?”

Moving to digital is great to a point, but I’m still a believer in relationships and humans, not a robot on the telephone.

I love remote capture or automated deposit. I love technology, I really do. But I don’t love it to the expense of relationships.

HM: Do you see that going away?

DM: We have it now. I love it. I don’t think it will change in our bank because it’s part of our culture and at United Community, who bought us, it’s a big part of their culture. The cultures are very much the same in the aspect of getting involved in your community face-to-face and know your customer. I don’t see that changing at all with Progress now. Do I see that change in the world? I don’t know.

HM: Business executives often talk about giving back to the community and sometimes they even incorporate that into their policies. Do you think that corporate citizenship is an important consideration for a company? And if you do, why is it?

DM: I absolutely think it is. It was a part of Progress when we started. One thing we do when we build a new branch, we put art in that branch only from local artists in the area. I would go into the community and go in all these galleries and meet the artists and then I would pick pieces to go into that building.

When we opened in Huntsville, we would have these open houses for our customers and let the artists bring in all the work and have an art show in the bank. We used it as an open house for the customers and for the artist. We believed in them and invested in the community. And it really grew from there.

After we’d been open a bit, we started giving an employee an extra day off in addition to their vacation to go work in a charity of their choice, something that they think is important. A year or two ago, we gave every market $10,000 at Christmas for them to go do something in their market specifically targeted to the holidays that was special in that market. This was just a small fraction of all we have given in all of our markets to the communities in which we operate. We also encourage everybody to go work out in your community and volunteer and not just give your money but give your time.

I think it is vital because your business is in that community and the only way your business is going to be successful in a community bank is if your community is successful. If you’re not willing to invest in your community and those businesses, then why would they invest in you? It’s a two-way street to me.

HM: Tell us about the merger and what the merger means to you.

DM: They’re United Community Bank. We were approaching $2 billion, they’re closer to $30 billion, So they’re a lot bigger than us. We closed it in January. Our CEO is staying with the bank for a while. He’ll be head of all our original Progress markets. I am retiring at the end of April, so I am thrilled.

We’ve been growing about $100 million a year since this started. I’m a little tired. I’ve had finance, shareholders, operations, finance, IT and HR the whole time. It has ballooned and I’m just ready to take a break from it for a little while.

I’m going to take a little while off and then I won’t go back with something with this kind of regulation. I want to do something fun. Maybe a nonprofit, maybe something with women and children, some type of business that relates to their needs as that is a passion of mine.

I loved coming back and teaching the class at Auburn, doing some guest speaking and things like that would be fun. I still have a high schooler at home, so I want to be able to have some time with her that I haven’t had.

HM: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were at Harbert?

DM: Learning to relate to people is just as important as the actual curriculum you’re learning. I thought I was a great student and I thought it was all about having to know all those accounting rules. And that’s important so you could do your job. But equally important is communication and being able to relate to people. When I was in public accounting, you had to relate to your customer and your team, the people you were auditing.

When I was building Progress, I had hired people my whole career. I needed to be able to recruit, which I could do and I enjoyed, but you need those people skills. So I wish I had understood that the people skills you gained, your networking skills, building that network, all of that is just as important as what is in that textbook. I did not understand that when I was younger.

I went to work for Ernst & Young right out of college. I learned that I had no practice in learning to talk to adults in a business setting. I had to learn by baptism by fire right there on the job.

I was a War Eagle Girl at Auburn. That prepared me to be able to give a tour to adults and interact with the board of trustees and all, but not in a business setting. I had very small internship versus these big internships they do now, so I think they’re better prepared than we were.

You just had to learn on the fly. There were stumbling blocks to that, but you learned. Getting the work experience and the internship and putting those kids into that environment before they’re out on their own is huge. I hire interns a lot now at Progress. I am big on investing in them because I want to be able to give back and it prepares them so much more for down the road.

Take advantage of all the opportunities you’re given. I was lucky enough to be given some really incredible opportunities, and I had people who believed in me. When you’re given that, you need to take advantage of it and soar. Many people are given the opportunities, but it’s what you do with them. HM

The Sweet Science

Business, boxing and training for uncertainty

We’re in the wake of the pandemic, not fully over supply chain shocks. There’s a war in Europe, record inflation, banking failures, a looming recession, volatile energy prices and a job market that seems to swing between record low unemployment and layoffs that run to the tens of thousands. Information and misinformation move at tremendous velocity. We can barely track where the next blow’s coming from. If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that we need to be prepared for instability, complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

So how do businesses handle a bout with uncertainty? Most management advice tells us to be prepared, to have a plan in place, to hedge against risk, protect cash, have inventory in reserve, all of which build the resilience to go the distance. Oh, and remain agile. And most management advice seems to cheerfully ignore the contradictions. A crisis is not a crisis if you’re prepared for it. Uncertainty is not an issue if you have a definite process to deal with uncertainty. Resilience and agility? It’s kinda hard to be agile when you’re stuck in the corner, trying to cover your assets.

Despite the uncertain times and a certain amount of confusion in how we deal with them, we know that there will be winners and losers. So how do we line up on the winning side?

Chances are, the strategic approach developed in a stable environment won’t work in a time of uncertainty. Maybe we should look at the strategic, decision-making tools differently.

Before we go there, and not to split hairs, there’s a difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk can often be calculated. In a risky situation, the factors that determine success or failure are outside our control, but the odds are more or less known. When we roll the dice, we know there are more combinations to get to seven than there are to get to 12. The neuroscientists will tell you that when you estimate risk, the parietal lobes of your brain light up. You’re thinking and calculating.

If we consider resources broadly — money, time, personnel, raw material, means of production, inventory — we tend to see crisis as scarcity. So, the business question becomes how to do more with less? Do we cultivate alternative sources of supply, stockpile cash, and/or inventory, and employ some variety of business/portfolio diversification? A hedge against risk. We know we’re gonna get hit, so we cover up to minimize damage.

Uncertainty is another matter.

The factors that create uncertainty are not necessarily outside our control but are largely unknown. Faced with uncertainty, the amygdala, the lizard brain, sends distress signals to the hypothalamus. When that happens, thinking doesn’t. Doesn’t mean we can’t work through uncertainty, but we’re not exactly optimized for the task.

In an uncertain environment we’re playing a game where the problems, solutions and rules are unclear. It’s hard to handle the punches you don’t see coming and a low blow is possible.

Researchers have identified three basic methods that help organizations respond to volatile, uncertain environments: routines, generalizations (heuristics) and improvisations.

In stable times, when problems are relatively finite in number and consistent in nature, organizations usually rely on routine. For example, data may tell us that we will experience cyclical delays in raw material delivery; or after X hours on the line, certain machinery may require overhaul. Routine is our friend and successful organizations have established routines that anticipate where problems are likely to occur and where a hedge against risk is appropriate. We may not know exactly when a problem will occur, but we can distinguish between the big risks and the small risks and prepare accordingly. We’re thoroughly assessing, thinking, calculating, anticipating.

When things step just outside the realm of routine, we commonly rely on simple rules of thumb. The behavioral scientists call them heuristics. It’s a fancy word for the mental shortcuts, the assumptions, that facilitate decision making. We hurry past shadowy figures in a darkened alley, assuming danger lurks. When we flick the switch and the kitchen light doesn’t go on, we don’t think circuit breaker, wiring, switch, socket; we change the bulb. We don’t know for a fact that the bulb is the problem, but most of the time it is. We rely on heuristics when we think there’s likelihood of a certain outcome and where speed is more important than thoroughness and precision.

When we pass into the realm of unknown unknowns, there’s no instruction manual. We’re improvising, spontaneously reacting to address the unforeseen.

You step into the ring. Your opponent approaches. You know generally what’s about to happen, but you’ve got to react to, and work with a highly volatile environment. That reaction is improvisation and successful improvisation relies on focus, awareness, and the agility to take advantage of the environment — all of which are refined by preparation. Joshua Funk, a past director of Chicago’s renowned improv group Second City, will tell us — with no small amount of irony — that getting good at improvisation takes practice.

To use these decision-making, problem-solving methods effectively, we must understand their strengths and weaknesses, apply them appropriately, and move fluidly between them. These methods then become a set of tools that work together — a toolkit that an organization and its managers can use to create both resilience and agility. Both are necessary if we are to turn problems into possibilities.

Routines lie at the heart of operational efficiency. They are often constructed by those on the so-called front line or relatively close to the front line — workers, analysts, salespeople — and refined and codified by management who can see routines as the tactical execution of strategic plans. Routines usually work best when things are, well, routine. When the environment is stable.

However, changing established routines can be a slow, even painful process. When we need to move faster than routines allow, but we more or less understand the problems we’re encountering, the generalizations and assumptions give us a shortcut; however, we should be aware that our generalizations may be incomplete and our assumptions in error. The voice in the dark alley may be calling for help, and the lightbulb may be fine; the socket’s the problem.

Routines and heuristics are experienced-based and thus backward looking and have little application to the unforeseen, the uncertain.

You can’t literally practice for the unforeseen, precisely because it’s unforeseen, but you can practice how you react. That’s how boxers train. Sparring doesn’t teach the techniques of boxing; it teaches boxers how to react to a volatile, deceptive environment, and ultimately how to anticipate and quickly create the lines of defense and offense that lead to success.

Which brings up an interesting point.

To be successful, a boxer must simultaneously punch and avoid getting punched. Offense and defense at the same time.

The same may well be true of an organization’s leaders in times of stress and uncertainty. Research by McKinsey shows that “defense-only postures tend to lead to median company performance, while offense-only stances deliver a mix of occasional wins plus some catastrophic failures. The best leaders and companies… are prudent about managing the downside, while aggressively pursuing the upside.”

Note that these companies and leaders don’t have to be “right” all the time. Even a small edge, being just a few percent better than your competitors, can give you a substantial advantage. A boxer that avoids five percent of punches thrown and lands five percent more punches will win the match.

So how do organizations gain that competitive edge? Perception, commitment and response. Can we see something that others don’t? Are we sufficiently committed to revise our thinking and reallocate our resources? And lastly, can we pivot quickly and execute thoroughly?

Of course, we should examine our data and do our best to understand the environment, but are we also willing to modify our routines? Are we open to testing our assumptions? While C-suite executives may have a broad sense of the company and the marketplace, they may have little direct knowledge of what’s happening on the production line or what’s working with customers. In this regard, middle managers and frontline workers may be the best source of the information that originates at the edge of the enterprise. Executives should consider stepping outside hierarchical rigidity so information can move up and down the organization quickly and accurately.

Information may give a company an idea of what to do, but it must react decisively. Eventually, most executives make the right choices, but prompt, decisive action makes a leader. There are, of course, barriers to that decisive action. It’s natural that assets are sticky. Once allocations have been made, they tend to stay made. “The way we’ve always done it” is an obstacle to change. Before an enterprise can respond to the insight it has gathered, it must be committed to responding. It must be willing to reallocate and reassess before it can reinvent.

And lastly, the organization must be capable of speedy, precise, thorough execution. Here again, a flexible hierarchy may be advantageous. Executives create the environment and provide the resources, but it’s the managers and workers who do the job. From that perspective, the willingness of the executive team to shove responsibility and authority to the edges of the organization, to those who interact directly with the product and those who buy it, may create the best competitive edge.

So how do you best respond to uncertainty and end up on the side of the winners? Understand the basic approaches to problem solving and use them fluidly, as a whole toolkit. Realize that you must play offense and defense at the same time. Let go of preconceptions, test assumptions, listen to and collaborate with your employees and give them the authority to execute their responsibilities well.

Maybe we should be doing those things every day. And maybe if we did, we’d be prepared to slip whatever punches uncertainty may throw at us and take advantage of the opening to land a knockout.

— Bruce Kuerten

Be The One Who Creates Uncertainty

When we talk about uncertainty, we typically ask how to deal with it, but the best managers turn the problem around to ask what they can do to create uncertainty for others. This is precisely what management professors Brian Connelly and Dave Ketchen (with co-authors from Texas A&M, Kentucky and Nebraska) found in their study published in the Strategic Management Journal.

They examine “the degree of surprise or unpredictability” in corporate strategy, which refers to a competitor’s relative inability to determine what is coming next. “Imagine a boxer who throws a jab, a hook, and an uppercut,” Connelly said. “That is a nice variety, but they are not effective if you know which of these punches they are about to deliver.

“The same can be said of corporations. If competitors are uncertain about how you are going to hit them next, maybe with price reductions or an acquisition or expansion into a geographic market, it creates a strategic competitive advantage that yields long-term performance benefits.”

In business school parlance, we sometimes talk about managers needing multiple tools in their toolbelt to deal with a variety of problems that might come their way, but Connelly and Ketchen add that managers should also have multiple weapons in their arsenal so they can be the ones creating uncertainty in the competitive market space instead of the ones trying to deal with it.

Despite the uncertain times and a certain amount of confusion in how we deal with them, we know that there will be winners and losers. So how do we line up on the winning side?

Chances are, the strategic approach developed in a stable environment won’t work in a time of uncertainty. Maybe we should look at the strategic, decision-making tools differently.

Uncertainty is another matter.

In an uncertain environment we’re playing a game where the problems, solutions and rules are unclear. It’s hard to handle the punches you don’t see coming and a low blow is possible.

Researchers have identified three basic methods that help organizations respond to volatile, uncertain environments: routines, generalizations (heuristics) and improvisations.

When we pass into the realm of unknown unknowns, there’s no instruction manual. We’re improvising, spontaneously reacting to address the unforeseen.

Routines and heuristics are experienced-based and thus backward looking and have little application to the unforeseen, the uncertain.

Which brings up an interesting point.

To be successful, a boxer must simultaneously punch and avoid getting punched. Offense and defense at the same time.

Maybe we should be doing those things every day. And maybe if we did, we’d be prepared to slip whatever punches uncertainty may throw at us and take advantage of the opening to land a knockout.

— Bruce Kuerten

Modern Day Canaries In The Coal Mine

Stay attuned to the first signs of trouble

Remember “Game of Thrones?” A huge wall at the northern extremity of the kingdom was guarded by a group of ever-vigilant warriors dressed in black looking for invading evildoers. The Night’s Watch was tasked with warning the rest of the kingdom when an all-destroying zombie army led by a centuries-old magical villain riding an undead dragon was fast approaching to wipe out humanity.

In 1896, after a deadly explosion in a Welsh coal mine, engineer John Haldane invented a cage that allowed canaries to accompany miners into the depths. The tiny yellow songbirds were sensitive to deadly gases seeping into the mine shafts. When they stopped chirping and fluttering, the miners knew to drop their picks and shovels and run to daylight and fresh air.

In the world of business, the watchers on the wall wear dark suits and study spreadsheets, algorithms, and rows of numbers flashing by on a computer screen that tell of things like acceptable levels of volatility based on historical patterns that project future earnings. When the heroes in risk assessment detect a wheezing canary, they alert the C-suite that urgent action is required.

Cash Flow: source of all good and evil

A classic indicator of the health of a company is its cash flow. Whether you’re CEO of a multinational corporation or own a popsicle stand at the beach, if you can’t make payments on your loans, winter is coming.

In these times of economic uncertainty, rising interest rates have set off some cash-flow alarms, said James Long, Amy B. Murphy Distinguished Professor in the School of Accountancy.

“Companies have enjoyed years of low interest rates, so (high interest rates) can affect their cash-to-debt ratio,” he said. “Lapse in cash flow is a classic predictor of trouble ahead, but you have to be sure that it’s a result of cash shortage.”

He explained: “If a company has a cash-to-debt ratio of 1.2, that means they have $1.20 for every dollar of debt they carry. If that ratio drops to .80, there’s no question they are in trouble. But if it dips to say, $1.05, it could mean they are just doing a better job of managing their cash flow and don’t feel they need to keep 20% in savings.”

Established, well-known companies have failed to interpret balance sheet anomalies in time. Mostly, they no longer exist.

Kmart, a popular discount retail store, had more than 2,000 locations in the U.S. But by the 1990s, it was getting clobbered by fast-growing Walmart rumbling to its destiny as a retail monolith. Realistically, there was no way Kmart could compete with Walmart. Kmart was going under, one way or the other.

The Other Way

The final blow came when hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert became notorious — and very rich — when he studied the ratios and realized that the worth of the company was in its real estate holdings. Kmart owned a slew of buildings in prime shopping locations across America. The stock was down, so Lampert bought it up until he had control of the company. Then he started selling off stores.

When he was done, so was Kmart, and Lampert was a few billion dollars richer.

More recently, Bed Bath and Beyond has been on the verge of bankruptcy for years. The company said it might have to declare Chapter 11 in a January 2023 statement after yet another quarter of staggering losses. But January came and went, management kept the bankruptcy lawyers on the sidelines and began desperately trying to hang onto what remains. The company has spent billions on stock buybacks, is billions in debt, cash poor, and the stock dropped 50 percent in February. It said it will close 150 more stores and lay off an unspecified number of workers.

Dance with the Music

Bed Bath and Beyond violated Rule One of survival as described by a veteran music business executive. Carlos Monnaco, a 2011 Harbert MBA graduate, is vice president of finance for Capitol Records’ CMG Division — Christian music. Music companies were among the first to get hit by internet piracy. Then came free tunes on YouTube, file-sharing, and other fast-emerging digital formats. They decided rather than fight, they’d join the surge of new technology.

“Lean into change” is his advice to businesses struggling with rapid innovation. “Don’t be resistant to change — it’s going to be painful, and it’ll take a lot of work. But (change is) going to happen for a lot longer than you think. It’s not going away.”

Monnaco said the music business realized 25 years ago that brick-and-mortar record stores were circling the drain. They had to find ways to take the product to the consumer.

“Leverage that change, become an active participant in that change,” Monnaco said. “Look into what is driving the change. What are consumers looking for? And how do you make money at that?”

Music insinuated itself into the internet and became part of the online experience. The industry found common ground in what music lovers wanted and how businesses could reach them: streaming models, easy access, and embracing new platforms for delivery. YouTube is free to the consumer, but it sells ads, and Capitol gets a cut of that, Monnaco said. Spotify has ads and subscriptions. Amazon Music is subscription-only. TikTok is a relatively new source — people hear a bit of a song and want to find out who that artist is. Peloton — the stationary bike company — puts together digital playlists for its customers and classes.

“We don’t make up the playlists,” Monnaco said. But they know that people working out on a stationary bike will pedal harder when they hear their favorite jam. A sign of the times: Monnaco said they are exploring music’s contribution to mental health. Music can pick you up when you’re down, move you spiritually, soothe heartbreak, bring back memories.

“Love of music hasn’t changed,” Monnaco said. But the method of delivery has changed, and his company constantly searches for new ways to meet humanity’s primal need for music. In a Slovenian cave, archaeologists found the world’s oldest instrument, a 60,000-year-old bone flute — made by Neanderthals. About 40,000 years ago, modern humans, our ancestors, made an almost identical flute.

Times change. Even humans evolve. But music is hardwired in.

Electric Slide

Christy Wright, a 1992 Harbert alum who is senior vice president of corporate finance with Southwire, North America’s largest wire and cable manufacturer, said her company delivers power responsibly. Look around your neighborhood. Any power coming in may have been transmitted and distributed through their cables. Most of the electronic stuff inside your walls — schools, hospitals, you name it — they make, along with tools that make electrical contractors’ lives easier.

When making forecasts, Wright said, one of the most important places to look is inside the company.

“Ask all parts of the company what’s hurting,” she said. Then find out why. Southwire has many constituents. Peers, product management, inside sales, field sales, supply chain partners, transportation partners, distribution partners. Find out what needs work.

“We in the finance world are known to look at trends,” she said. “We have more data now, and trends move faster. Access to data is huge. There’s so much of it and it comes at you fast.”

The number of factors to be considered are mind-boggling. But digesting digital data is what corporate finance people do.

They also put it into plain language and explain what changes are to be made, how and why. Wright is good at that. As a financial partner, she talks to the commercial team. They’re the ones who talk to the customers and sell them products.

Like any business, it’s about the customers.

The Future is Here

Ashish Gupta, Harbert’s Globe Life Professor of Analytics, doesn’t have a crystal ball. He’s got something better. He and his team produce predictive analytic programs that identify problems before the human mind possibly could.

His programs are different from traditional analysis.

“There’s lots and lots of data, and we use intensive techniques,” he said.

In simplest terms, they rely on computers, servers, crunch a lot of data, then put together remarkably complex mathematical analysis tools that can detect and head off problems before they take root.

These models must be versatile and able to reflect changes that happen in an eyeblink.

“Life is not linear,” Gupta said. “Nothing happens in a straight line. We live in a nonlinear, dynamic world.”

The projects his team is working on sound like witchery. But they’re just numbers and data — a fantastic quantity of numbers and data, swirling incredibly fast, creating computer models that predict remarkable things.

Why They Call it ‘Big Data’

Many consumers base purchase decisions on reviews of the product, Gupta said.

For instance, take the Google App Store — fake reviews could damage the company brand by influencing people to buy an app that wouldn’t perform.

Maybe one in a million people are committing fraud, he said. It would be impossible to identify them without the programs.

“We can tell with a high degree of accuracy a fraudulent review,” he said. Liars are in a different state of mind. “The way you would write something true is different from how you write a lie.”

The model can detect “hidden emotions,” that tip the liar’s hand, he said, and the bogus review gets zapped. Good news: the same principle can detect fake news.

Self-driving cars may be the next big thing. But who doesn’t have a slight concern that you might get in the car, tell it to go to the grocery store, push the wrong button and wind up in Mexico City?

“We have models that help improve self-driving cars from a business point of view to make people trust them,” he said.

Healthcare is a business where mistakes can be catastrophic. Hospitals don’t make decisions based on one data point, Gupta said.

“We take a larger view, we look at larger health issues, not only on how a company is doing today but long-term health products in that area,” he said. Projects in the healthcare field prevent damage not only to the brand, but to patients.

“We have developed several models that can detect on a real-time basis,” he said of his work.

“Some of these challenges are pretty big. Problems that are a huge challenge to society in general. The pandemic problem was huge, the impact it had on business, not only on people, but the supply chain, the way people think.”

There are challenges of hunger, food shortage, energy shortage — the war in Ukraine has brought this to the forefront.

Closer to home, for Homeland Security, a few seconds of delay could cause hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. Or worse.

“We are developing models and software. We are using our system approach, how dots are connecting. We can collect data and correct the problem if it’s used right.”

— Tom Ensey

Darn.

Unraveling the inevitable tangles in the supply chain

Type “what does supply chain mean?” into Google and you’ll see this: “The sequence of processes involved in the production and distribution of a commodity.”

That’s vague.

The visual elements are not much help. A picture is not always worth 1,000 words. Sometimes pictures are desperate efforts to represent a big idea. The extremes of illustrative graphics range from:

The overly simple: A line of perfectly symmetrical rectangles connected by arrows, resembling the sort of wooden toy train a child would play with.

Trying to do too much: A mad cluster of different-colored circles, squares, polygons, and links depicting farmers in straw hats, miners and workers in hard hats, stalks of corn, piles of coal, an oil well, boats, planes, trains, and trucks delivering raw materials to a small factory with smoke coming out the chimney labeled “supplier.” More trucks pour out of the supplier to deliver massive shipments to a giant factory from which even more trucks issue forth to bring finished products to all the retailers, represented by a single storefront with a canopy over the door. Throw in a random computer or two, a cash register, men in suits shaking hands, and a happy family standing in front of their house holding their new product, a big brown box wrapped in tape with a dollar sign floating overhead.

It’s weird, but it’s a closer representation of supply chain intricacies than a child’s choo-choo.

Resilience, agility and uncertainty

By its very nature, the supply chain is in an eternal state of uncertainty. Tinkering, adjusting, and fixing smaller problems before they become big ones is what the experts do. Resilience and agility are qualities devoutly to be wished for in a supply chain, but the two can work against each other.

How flexible can a single link of the supply chain really be? The more links you have, the more flexibility you can have, but the more efficient the supply chain, the less flexibility you have.

Put another way, to add some resilience, you likely have to sacrifice some efficiency. Otherwise, you don’t have much wiggle room if the supply chain breaks somewhere, making it hard to adapt quickly.

Before the pandemic, the leaned-out, right-on-time supply chain approach worked well — until it didn’t. When the supply chain broke, it really broke, leaving few options for quick repair.

2020 was a year that really broke all sorts of things. Everywhere, business ground to a halt as the United States and the rest of the world shut down to avoid the potentially fatal, incurable novel virus that seeped into every corner of civilization. The only defense, we were told, was to stay home with the windows closed. And when you did go out, come home and wash your hands like Lady Macbeth.

After a slow return to something resembling normal, it all seems unreal now. Remember shortages of toilet paper, bleach, cleaning products — even sponges? At times there was no fresh fruit, vegetables or Conecuh sausage.

And medicine? That was huge — long lines of crotchety people standing six feet apart and grumbling, then going ballistic when the pharmacists told them to come back in a few days and maybe their medicine would be in stock.

There was a run on thermometers as prices soared from $7.95 to 60 bucks because fever was the first sure sign of a bad dose of COVID-19. Amazon Prime’s two-day delivery promise overnight became “to be determined.”

Did you memorize the delivery truck arrival schedules at the neighborhood grocery and drug store and stand in line outside at 7 a.m. waiting for them to open the doors? Remember how the few restaurants that were still open sent servers in rubber gloves, hairnets and surgical masks to bring your food to the curb while you waited in your car wearing your own mask, surgical gloves and… OK, you probably skipped the hairnet.

Perhaps you noticed inflation…

Prices began to climb immediately and still are. Cumulative prices on everything have increased by almost 18 cents on the dollar since 2019. Gasoline is up about 45%. Chuck steak is $12 a pound. Call the bank for a loan if you want ribeyes for the fam: $21 a pound. Electricity is up 11%. Those good eggs, the cage-free ones, are almost 10 bucks a dozen.

What’s causing this?

Do you remember the endless news stories on ports of entry in Los Angeles, Savannah, Baltimore, Charleston — every city in America with wharves where cargo ships unload? By 2021, some cargo ships as large as 1,200 feet loaded with more than 24,000 shipping containers— holding as much as a 44-mile-long freight train — were anchored far out to sea waiting for months until a loading dock opened so they could squeeze in and drop their shipments. That’s if there were enough laborers to run the cranes and enough room for the trucks to park.

All those ships, thousands of them, amounted to a single link in the supply chain. The delayed cargo deliveries affected thousands of businesses, all of which were battling multiple other supply chain disruptions.

The glut of ships was pretty much ironed out after about a year, a small miracle that raised hope in 2022 that things might be getting better. But business had no illusions about how much further there was to go.

Report from the front lines

Blake Sayers and Taylor Payne work for Robins & Morton, a Birmingham-based construction company. Eighty-six percent of its business is building hospitals and other large healthcare facilities across the South. Sayers, senior electrical preconstruction estimator, and Payne, preconstruction manager, both graduated from Auburn’s McWhorter School of Building Science.

Early in 2020, Payne went into overdrive looking for workarounds for the many problems. He highlighted a few major concerns he immediately encountered.

“Obviously, it was harder getting raw material for construction — copper, aluminum and wood. If you needed a big piece of equipment, it was harder getting that equipment to the job site,” he said.

The electrical guru Sayers spoke to his area of expertise — keeping the lights on and the juice flowing.

“For large-scale trauma centers, cancer centers and other big healthcare facilities, large generators and switching gear are taking up to two years to procure. Before the pandemic it took a third that long.” Some of their jobs typically only take three years.

Electrical relays and computer chips are getting harder and harder to find.

“Globally made parts are sent to the U.S. to be assembled,” he said. “(Delays) could be because of a problem with transportation, congested ports, customs in other countries. In the U.S., the backlogs are tremendous now. Those assembly lines are so bogged down for various reasons.”

It takes time to get the parts assembled, and once they are assembled, they must be tested and engineered, Sayers said.

Payne said in 2022, wire was about 75 percent more expensive. Pipe is 50% higher for EMP and PVC. In addition to the supply issues, there have been some natural disasters where PVC is manufactured, primarily in the Gulf area. He said the cost of copper is so high, they have started using aluminum as a conductor. Aluminum’s price is high, too, but not as bad as copper. They have started using warehouses and lay-down yards near construction sites so that they can store aluminum and other commodities bought at today’s prices. “Even with the rent on the warehouses and cost of lay-down yards, it’s cheaper that way,” Payne said.

Forced change is still change

Glenn Richey, Harbert Eminent Scholar and chair in Supply Chain Management, said some of the problem stems from “forward buying,” grabbing up a lot of supplies before they are needed to avoid projected rising prices. This can produce “the bullwhip effect.” A bullwhip has a long, heavy lash, and a mere flick of the wrist can cause a massive buildup of kinetic energy along its length, producing a big and painful enough crack to make a mighty bull do a cowboy’s bidding.

The artificial demand can create excess inventory that results from massive bulk at the bottom of the supply chain. This causes a ripple along the entire supply chain. This is not good, Richey said.

Breaking it down in the simplest sense: Purchasers suddenly buy a much bigger amount of a commodity than usual. The supplier sees this and buys more, assuming an increase in demand. Perhaps the purchaser buys even more to be on the safe side. And so on, as artificially increased demand works its way up the supply chain, creating a domino effect.

The system becomes choked. The numbers are skewed. It’s harder for businesses to forecast future needs.

The people who say that artificial intelligence can fix this don’t take into account that “if the numbers are garbage, the results will be garbage,” Richey said. Likewise, digitalization has been going on for some time, but all partners along the supply chain are not progressing at the same rate.

“You’re only as fast as the slowest one in the herd,” Richey said.

Can anything good happen?

Richey and Brian Gibson, executive director of the Center for Supply Chain Innovation, are working on models that look at more than cost and time. If businesses develop global, domestic and regional partners, depending on layout, they can assign each different rankings.

“The beauty of that approach is if Partner A stumbles, you’ve got Partner B there to step in,” Richey said. “There’s healthy competition there.” Sometimes bad things can lead to good changes.

The American Civil War caused an increase in industrialization that led to more speed and lower costs in the 1880s. Atlanta became a significant transportation hub.

Creative destruction, a term coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter, indicates that “these disruptions that we have done to ourselves can cause innovations in the market. World War I and II led the way to how things changed during that destructive period,” Richey said.

Could the problems of today lead to the U.S. spearheading more economic development in underdeveloped Central America? The political situation is uncertain there, which has led to the U.S. not investing. But development could solve some of the pressing problems of today — poverty, violence, migration issues. Panama offers easy access to both sides of the globe. Transportation would be far easier from there than it would be from China, for example.

‘Coping’ not the right word

Sayers said they often hear the word “cope” when they’re asked how they have dealt with the enduring issues caused by the pandemic. He said he has learned it’s not so much a matter of coping as developing the right attitude, looking at things the right way, finding solutions where there were none.

He and his family were at Ground Zero of COVID in 2020. He was working on a big job in North Carolina, which isn’t that far away, but it wasn’t home. His wife was pregnant with their second child. They were lonesome.

His wife delivered their child in October, the height of the COVID crisis.

“Things were moving fast,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going on.”

But day in and day out, he saw how long and hard healthcare workers attacked the challenges of administering care to the massive influx of patients while he was navigating a supply-chain challenge. Like them, he was battling as hard as he could, one day at a time, to get through it.

“It’s easy to say gloom and doom, but I related to what we were doing on a daily basis. I saw the impact of what we were doing in the middle of a real-world pandemic. It built a fire under me and gave me pride in how important our job is.”

Payne thought a minute when he was asked whether the supply chain would ever return to the way it was before Covid, or whether we were still seeking a new normal.

“There’s no true normal,” he finally said. “The job is always progressing. Covid has made us be progressive and quicker. The larger lay-down yards and warehouses are a good idea. I think we’ll still use them even when Covid is behind us. It made us change things we wouldn’t have changed otherwise.”

Sayers agreed. “Right now, you can look back at 2019 and say that was normal. But if you had asked us that same question in 2019, we probably wouldn’t have given you the same answer.”

— Tom Ensey

Reading Into The Future

Without a digital strategy, success is not in the cards

For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”

— Mark Zuckerberg, 2006

Marketing was once a long, laborious, meticulous art. Preparing to launch a product or service meant months, even years, of planning, coordination, execution.

That world has disappeared, demolished by all things digital. Now, every little move, every keystroke, every uploaded piece of content, erupts minute to minute.

It’s constant creation, tweaking, simply getting it out there. The message to the untold masses: Here is our product, our service. Here’s why you need it. Please take 5 seconds to take a look.

The how, the where, the who… still in large part a mystery.

Most businesses are failing at social media and digital marketing, says Emory Serviss, lecturer in the Department of Marketing. And he lays the blame on a lack of strategy.

“Social media teams are often spread too thin and being asked to do too much with very little budgetary support,” Serviss said. “Therefore, questions related to day-to-day administrative tasks like where to post what content take priority, versus developing and formulating what should be said and why it should be said.

“The priority should be a strong social media strategy that complements all other marketing and sales efforts and provides the necessary resources to the social media team to ensure they can be successful.”

The swift shift

Only in the past decade has the job of “content creator” become a vital part of marketing. The same is true of “influencer.” Collaborating with social media personalities on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube has become an essential component of companies like Hello Fresh, Nord VPN and Castify.

Offer a sponsorship and put the product or service in the hands of influencers — whether they have 1,000 followers or 5 million — and the marketing becomes organic. It’s the way Gen Z does business. Still, that generation, hands on iPads since toddlerhood — isn’t known for its long attention span. They develop a parasocial relationship with a particular influencer, see the 1-minute lip gloss demonstration, and it’s two clicks toward a purchase at the TikTok Shop, built into that platform.

But once that purchase is made, customers demand accountability. In early February, the phrase “bullying works” trended on Twitter. Context: If a mob of social media users gang up on corporate America, corporate America will give in, rewrite terms of service, redesign unpopular video games or sneakers. The target in this case: Netflix and its longstanding leniency in allowing subscribers to share their account passwords with friends and family. The streaming account posted that the policy no longer applied. Users would be required to verify their home devices every month from the company’s website.

No sharing of passwords? A storm erupted, but just as quickly subsided. The admonishing post on Netflix’s social accounts? Reversed with a second announcement.

During the tumult, Twitter was talking. A user named Sara responded, “Yep. It’s not bullying, it’s putting your $ where your mouth is & holding these corporations accountable for their actions & inaction.” AlphonsoMango concurred, tweeting, “Consumer(s) have the ultimate power. It’s a good thing that people realize this and utilize it.”

But users’ demands can venture into the impossible— at least in the short to medium term. Sometimes, the rampant complaints even venture into the absurd. Their demands just can’t be met.

On social media, backlash from an unpopular corporate decision likely appears hundreds or thousands of times a day. It would be ludicrous, even impossible, to give in to all of the backlash.

But one ironclad rule is to never, ever, let comments lie dormant. Or, worse, gather steam. Reply as close to instantly as possible, advises social media management company Social Pilot, which eases companies through the process.

Another rule: Don’t make false promises. When a Starbucks customer posted a complaint that she didn’t get her free birthday reward when she went in the day after her birthday, the company gently reminded her the reward is valid only on a customer’s actual birthday. (Yes, it gets that trivial.) Starbucks prompted her to tap the email link to get in touch with customer service.

When there’s no quick fix to a customer’s social media complaint, explain yourself. It’s what IKEA does on Facebook — explaining, always politely, what caused the problem, whether it can be resolved, and that not every problem that erupts is the company’s fault.

An additional wise practice is to take the matter out of the spotlight. Shoe giant DSW was met with an all-caps, no-context Instagram comment on one of their ads: “Worst customer serviceeee!” Right under the complaint, DSW replied, “We would like to hear more about this,” prompting the customer to reach out to email its social media division.

Above all else, personalize the message. While a bot can generate an efficient automated reply, nothing can replace a personalized response. It’s what Delta Airlines does to show that the company genuinely wants to help. It shows empathy.

A new, empathetic connection with customers emerged with the onset of Covid. The message, across the board, was some iteration of “We care.” That connection has grown in the past three years. Serviss says it is now integral.

“Empathy is quickly becoming the key determining factor of success for brands hoping to maintain connection with their customers on social media during these uncertain times,” he said. “Brands need to show they understand and care about the challenges their customers are facing, listening to what their customers are saying on social media and responding when and where appropriate.”

Ever-shifting platforms, the power of reels, turning on a dime

Helming the social media realm of companies are the people who came of age in this world: Gen Z and later millennials.

Madison Sosebee, a 2019 Harbert grad, is a social media marketing specialist at the Atlanta-based Lumistella Company, home of the beloved holiday staple, The Elf on the Shelf.

She’s been in the social media marketing game for over five years, ever since she joined the team of another Auburn grad, John Butts, at his company, Muscle Up. Even just half a decade ago, the landscape was vastly different from what it has become.

Back then, she said, “Social media was really starting to boom from a business perspective and there weren’t as many constant platform and algorithm updates as there are now. Every business was focused on two things: pushing content organically and amplifying that with paid support. There wasn’t a worry about if the algorithm was going to prioritize one piece of content over another.”

Reels — those now ubiquitous, user-generated short-form videos shared on nearly every social media site — weren’t even a thing yet. Stories, brief video narratives, were still relatively new.

Now, Sosebee and her colleagues are constantly staying on their toes as they work with multiple clients in various industries. Just since 2019, she says, “there have been so many changes.”

A monumental change was the TikTok boom. The mobile app was downloaded by 1.5 billion users in 2019 and 2020 alone. Suddenly, hordes of young people were creating, sharing and discovering short videos at a breakneck pace, often remaining glued to the app for hours. TikTok’s vitality led to the rise of YouTube shorts and Instagram reels.

“Short-form video content has been on the rise for years and is going to continue to be a priority for all social media platforms,” Sosebee said, adding that Meta, formerly Facebook Inc. and now also the owner of Instagram, WhatsApp and 91 other companies, constantly updates its algorithms to fit consumer behavior that aligns with the consumption of short-form content.

“Instagram received a lot of heat for this back in 2022 because consumers simply wanted ‘Instagram to be Instagram again,’” she said. “They missed seeing images from their followers, but instead were being served what Meta considered ‘personalized, recommended content’ on their feed that consisted of mainly reels.

Now brands are constantly asking, “What content is resonating with my audiences and what can we do to increase the reach of this content?” Brands must repeatedly pivot to consider new resources for content offerings.

Looming uncertainties; navigating the unknown

“There will always be uncertainties with social media because these platforms can make an update in an instant and it can throw your entire strategy for a loop,” Sosebee said of marketers centered solely on these platforms.

And the biggest of the big platforms present the most challenging uncertainties.

Because it is a China-based company, major privacy concerns have led to recent TikTok bans in U.S. and state government spaces and many educational institutions, with an even more dramatic national ban looming as a possibility. That’s led to a surge in short-form video trends within Meta and YouTube, which aim to lure young viewers to their own short-form formats.

And with mogul Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter, that platform has been upended with algorithm changes, political and social upheaval, and countless other problems.

“A lot of consumers have had negative reactions towards this update, and it is causing the platform to lose the number of registered accounts and the amount of ad spend brands use to amplify content on Twitter,” Sosebee said.

“The best way to stay ahead of these trends is to constantly engage in research,” she said. “There are great resources that report on updates every single day. My personal favorite is Social Media Today.”

She checks that source weekly to develop reports and update her team on what’s to come – a potential strategy shift for the year, say, or a new trending topic that can be capitalized in terms of content creation and development.

“Truly, the only way to prepare for these sporadic updates is to be nimble and have the bandwidth and resources to pivot when necessary. Typically, when we see one large update from one platform, we can expect a similar update from another. Making predictions on these is great, but be prepared to shift strategy within an instant.”

As Serviss said, a good strategy is key. That’s a mantra Sosebee and her contemporaries thrive on.

“An omnichannel approach to marketing will win every single time.” Sosebee says. “While digital platforms are always evolving, it is still important to constantly A/B test because as we have learned, things can change in an instant. Using an omnichannel approach allows for brands to pivot more easily and find where their audience is most engaged and has that highest conversion rate, whether that is through social media, Google, in-app, or traditional advertising.”

Serviss concurs that digital marketers are still grappling with how to operate in this ever-changing world, and it may always be a struggle. How do you navigate marketing in a fragmented, upended social media landscape?

“Focus on producing content that meets customers’ needs and provides value,” he said. “Use compelling storytelling to connect with them emotionally. Social media platforms come and go, but if you produce high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience on a consistent basis, they will seek you out.”

— Teri Greene

Batten Down The Hatches

Engage your employees to help steer through the storm

To you, the captains of industry at the helms of company ships, leery eyes glued to roiling horizons and stormy skies, a question: Who are your people? Do you have a first mate with an aft eye to gauge how much the winds of Covid still fill your sails? Can your navigator’s compass change the angle of your bow so the black waves breaking over the gunnels do less damage than they might? Does your crew fully understand the existential dangers in the wine-dark seas ahead, your vision of how to sail clear to flat water, and their duties to help get there?

Forgive the nautica, but according to practically everyone there is a storm coming, and no matter how advanced our radar we probably won’t know how bad it’ll be until we’re in it. Which is no comfort to most company CEOs, who, according to statistics, have thrived mightily in an expanding economy, but have never had to weather a global recession. Indeed, according to The Wall Street Journal, the median tenure for CEOs of S&P 500 companies between the last downturn in 2008 and today was only 10 years, which means many of our captains will be navigating their maiden stormy voyage.

But there’s a playbook for this, right? Past is prelude, lessons learned, tighten here, slash there, and unless it’s an absolute monster we should be good. Except that we’re just now slipping the surly bonds of Covid, which did no less than re-org how we work and bring our supply chain to its knees. Then there’s the S&P, which had its worst year since the last downturn, a potentially escalating land war in Europe and things aren’t exactly hunky-dory with the balloon-happy and sizable neighbors to the East.

So yes, past is prelude. Only this time, to what?

We don’t know, but if you’re in company leadership, remember that especially in hard times, it’s all about your people. Full stop. Obviously financial acumen and prioritizing resources matter, but as the Great Resignation taught us, your people are the true differentiating character of your company, and how you communicate to them in times of crisis is critical to its well-being. One of the greatest examples of this comes not from business but history with a scowl and a stogie, Winston Churchill.

From a guy who led England through a storm of a wholly different magnitude comes a compelling blueprint in his weekly radio address to the UK people, clinging to life under vicious Nazi air raids. In those critical moments, he did three things that were brilliant and instructive.

First, he spoke plainly of the problem. Not one to sugar-coat, he was sober in his assessment of how bad the crisis was, told his people what he knew and what he didn’t. Which, ironically, was reassuring. We know where we stand at this moment. As a leader, it’s vital that your employees understand that you fully understand the situation in which the company finds itself during a crisis. It provides them breathing room to trust that you’ll have strategies to overcome or ameliorate it.

Secondly, Churchill gave his countrymen reason to hope, not pie-in-the-sky, but concrete solid based on his strategy. He listed the actions the British military was taking, from doubling up production to moving medical units to the front lines to cooperating closely with the Allies. Company leadership can do the same, providing transparent examples of measures taken to blunt the economic forces working against you. Give your people reason to hope — and in the doing, direct all eyes to the light at the end of the dark hallway, even if it’s faint and far away.

Thirdly — and perhaps most difficult to pull off — was Churchill’s rallying cry, which inspired in England a sense of determined purpose, that if everyone came together and worked for the common good, they would see it through to victory. We’re made for this moment! As a leader in your company, you can be the voice that says “We’re all in this together.” Instill faith in your people that with the spirit of your workforce and the absolute belief in pulling together for the same purpose, the company can and will come out of this even stronger than before.

It’s a simple plan when you break it down: Here’s the problem, here’s how we’re attacking it, and if everyone does their part, we’ll come out of this to a bright future. (Probably not the best idea to do it chomping a cigar.)

In times of uncertainty, your leadership instincts will probably be to gather information, to get closer to your people, interact face-to-face with teams, all of which can be of benefit. For you, getting the valuable, organic, ground-level opinions of those who watch the company operate from a completely different perspective than yours. For them, the reassurance that comes from company leadership who cares to ask how they’re doing, what’s working, and what’s not. This kind of dialogue engenders trust, and trust inspires productivity, which leads to innovation, which helps build greater value in your brand. In hard times, that’s the kind of loop you want to be on.

I caught up with Harbert grad Bert Bean, CEO of Insight Global, an industry-leading talent solutions company, in his car driving I-26 on the way back from having that kind of conversation with his team in Charleston, one of Insight’s 70 offices nationwide. One of the first things he told me was that “communication is the most important part of the job.”

I can only assume he does that well because since his tenure as CEO, Insight has not only seen 80% growth, but also has accelerated the company’s commitment to social equity and hired its first director of DE&I to start a division focused on diverse practices for employees and clients. If you look on Bean’s LinkedIn page, the banner behind him reads Everyone Matters — and you believe him.

For 65 weeks during Covid, he had a weekly call with the far-flung employees of Insight Global, to not only keep everyone up to speed on company strategy, but also to share inspirational stories from around the company, to shine a light on individual contributors.

And as to ground-level views: “I had a gap in my calendar so I jumped in the car and headed to Charleston, love getting to the offices, see the team, lunch, dinner, find what they’re seeing in the market, what challenges they face. And from a leadership perspective what ideas are landing, what aren’t, what needs to be reframed or dropped.” In a downturn, he also stressed the importance of authentic listening, the key to understanding employee stress and anxiety about what the future holds for them.

Bean also believes in an offensive posture during a recession because people like to act, to change things for the better, find ways to help the company press forward. “Downturns only last six months to a year, and we can suffer through anything for a year. We’ll hold onto our values and our people.” Somehow, I get the sense from Bert Bean that those two things are inextricably intertwined. Everyone matters.

So, what happens if the storm turns ugly? Your sails are tattered, you’re taking on water and no matter how often you search the horizon for a sign of light, there’s none to be seen. What if your board is demanding cuts? One thing you might want to do is remind them that your people matter most, and fight like hell to find alternative ideas.

Is everyone taking on maximum responsibility? Are your systems running at their absolute leanest? If you have to shutter a production line, are there places those people can go that will add efficiencies in another? What about a furlough program like that CEO of a midwestern company created in the 2008 downturn? It allowed for all employees, top to bottom to take a month’s vacation without pay, so that everyone in the company shared the pain equally. (It even inspired trading of time off; those who could afford to take more traded weeks with those who couldn’t.) Because everyone matters.

So no matter how battered your ship may be when the storm passes, if everyone has fought together to reach the other side, yours will be the vessel that sails ahead in the new better time, battle-tested, inspired and all the more ready when the sea goes dark again.

— Rudy Gaines

Alumni Notes

1960s

Kerry Green (’68, business administration) retired from the Air Force as a full colonel in 1993, serving as a personnel officer, weapons system officer flying F-4s, commander of a basic military training squadron, and commander of a personnel resources group. He was an executive officer/military assistant to seven general officers in USAF headquarters, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and a Blue-Ribbon Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. In his second career at United Services Automobile Association as a VP, he developed USAA’s military public relations unit. His third career was as executive officer to the CEO of Air Force Village, a retirement community for military officers. He married high school sweetheart Kathleen June Connell (‘67, liberal arts) in 1966. They have three sons and seven grandchildren and are living in San Antonio.

Charlie Higgins (’63, business administration) is retired in Savannah, Georgia, after a career in the medical device business. He was VP of Sales for three leading companies. “My training at Auburn opened the door for me to get started in this business.”

Bucky McCamy (’65, business administration) says his Auburn blood runs deep. This year, two grandchildren enrolled, both at Harbert. They follow Bucky’s father Howard who graduated in 1941, McCamy himself in 1965 and his wife, Judy, (1965), as well as son Ward (1991) and his wife, Lindsey, (1998.) Now Ward’s son (2024) and his daughter (2025) are pursuing their degrees. Another son, Darby (1998), might have three daughters enroll. “I should have bought a house in 1961.”

1970s

Tim Barton (’78, accounting, ’79, MBA) completed a four-year term as a member of the Auburn Alumni Association in September 2022. He lives in Franklin, Tennessee, and now has “four beautiful granddaughters, all under age 4, living in the Birmingham area.” He transitioned from a VP Finance role in the travel industry during the pandemic in October 2020 to become executive director for Nashville Christian Towers, a senior adult independent living community. He recently coordinated the sale of the property to new ownership, closing in late December. He will stay on in his current role.

Cecil H. Glenn (’70, business administration) says “The Harbert College of Business opened so many doors for me over the last 53 years.” He worked as a manager for J.C. Penney and sales manager for three Fortune 500 companies, then retired from Gillette Corp. after 25 years. He followed that with a successful 12 years as a Realtor. He is nearly 77 years old and remains active in civic and social organizations on the Georgia coast. “I have seen my daughter and three grandchildren graduate from Auburn and go on to successful careers. We all bleed orange and blue.”

Jane Maples (’79, business administration) retired from NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center in December 2018 after a 36-year career. At NASA, she spent more than 15 years in procurement and more than 15 years negotiating and administering contracts. She served in other management positions dealing with implementation of new software and technology, including as agency software manager for NASA. She is “loving retirement, reading, traveling, and volunteering.”

Sanford Owens (’78, business administration) is retired from 24 years in the Foreign Commercial Service at the U.S. Department of Commerce. His postings overseas included stints at U.S. Embassies in Singapore, Austria, Slovakia, the Caribbean and Jordan, and included work at the European Development Bank in London promoting U.S. commercial exports and services. He led an embassy team focused on business development, regulatory policy and governance promoting foreign direct investment in Alabama, Texas and Georgia manufacturing.

Wade Robertson (’79 economics) says he reached retirement age but did not retire because business is good, he likes what he does, the pressure is off and he can work when he wants and fish when he can. He is president of Robertson Consulting, a search, recruiting and placement boutique that specializes in telecommunications and network services. He started the company 16 years ago after 25 years in the industry. He said his degree from Auburn was the foundation of “my understanding of the business world, monetary policies, financing, marketing and management. It also introduced me to the skills needed to build the relationships necessary to be successful and lead.”

Thomas Tripp (’75, accounting) graduated from The Culinary Institute of America in May 2022 as a professional chef and then again in December 2022 with a Bachelor of Professional Studies in the culinary arts with a concentration in farm to table. He said, “Retirement is fun.”

Diann Weeks (’73 business administration and Mike Weeks, ’74 accounting) celebrated 50 years of marriage in August 2022. They met on a blind date to homecoming and married two years later. Mike, a CPA, is retired from healthcare administration and Diann from the Medical Group Management Association. They raised two sons. One graduated from Auburn and is now a physician in Auburn and one graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and is now a physician in Atlanta. Diann and Mike recently moved back to Auburn from Mobile.

1980s

Harold “Woody” Alexander (’87, marketing) has accepted a new position as a regional sales executive with Global the Source, the leading master distributor of HVAC/R components to wholesalers in northern Florida and southern Georgia.

Jo Burkhalter (’89, MBA) moved to Auburn in 2019 and has been able to pursue a second career. She spent 25 years in sales and then was able to do what she loves — decorating. “It is a shift for sure from software sales, but it allows me to use my creative brain in ways I could not have imagined. I have met some amazing people and been able to make their homes beautiful.”

Glen Fradenburg (’84, finance) sold his company, Alamo Pressure Pumping, in August 2021. He has taken an interest in Guide Energy Solutions, a completions chemical company in Oklahoma, where he is Executive VP of the Permian Basin, selling completions chemicals in the Permian Basin. He is also involved with a frack plug company, Longbow Completions Services. “We developed a high-tech frack plug that removes risk associated with ball-in-place misfires and recovers efficiencies lost during the ball-drop operations.”

Garrett Gerst (’88, management) recently moved to the Auburn area. Currently a key account manager for Essity Health and Medical, he works with major e-commerce accounts across the country.

Taylor Hughes (’86, industrial/operations management) is in early semi-retirement and looking for opportunities in developing advanced predictive logistics solution vision and strategy for the Department of Defense. His final job in the defense industry was as Enterprise Architect for the United States Marine Corps portfolio of Logistics Information Technology Systems.

Larry Little (’83, management) met his wife at Auburn and both of their children graduated from Auburn with his daughter completing an MBA. “We are an AU family. My daughter and her husband met at Auburn and are successful entrepreneurs. My son is finishing a graduate degree in marriage and family counseling. My wife and I love Auburn and have been supporters of the university throughout the years.” He is founder, partner and CEO of a leadership development company called Eagle Consulting. It provides coaching, conferences, online courses, peer groups and curriculum aimed at making a difference in the lives of others. He’s the author of several books (“Make A Difference” was the first) and is host of a podcast called “Crossing the Line.” He said his degree at Auburn provided the foundation for his career.

Ted Longo (’85, finance) recently was named to the AdvisorHub.com website’s “Advisors To Watch” list. The judges rank advisors based on scale, growth and professionalism. He is president and senior wealth management advisor for The Longo Group, a firm he founded in August 2020 after a 34-year career with Merrill Lynch.

Melissa Love-Greenfield (’88, finance) was recently promoted to deputy comptroller for systemic risk identification and support in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Her responsibilities include overseeing the Supervision Risk Management team and managing the National Risk Committee processes.

James Mathews (’88, management) has owned his own residential construction company, Mathews Development Company LLC since 2006. Located in Montgomery, Alabama, the company’s focus is on new home construction in Montgomery, Lake Martin, Pike Road, and Lee County. “We have built over 500 homes and were just recognized as the Jerry Kyser Homebuilder of 2022 for the state of Alabama.” Truly a family business, the company has nearly tripled in growth the last six years “after the addition of my wife, Kimberly Key Mathews (’87, international business), and my daughter Caroline Mathews Campbell (’17, interior design). Auburn prepared each of us to be focused, logical, problem-solving adults.”

Mitchell Schuster (’81, marketing) says that after a few years in the business world and a new chapter in life, he returned to Auburn and earned a BS in Biochemistry and went to UAB for medical school. Now, 30 years after residency, he uses his business degree in the business of medicine. He represents all the OB/GYN providers in the U.S. in value determinations with CMS/Medicare for the gynecologic and office procedures performed on women. The process sets the base reimbursements for commercial insurance payments to providers in the United States. “The business education I received from Auburn pays off in the world of medicine as few providers understand the complexities of budgets, receivables, and practice expense.”

Leah Sowell (’89, economics) moved back to Auburn in 2021 after 20-plus years in the Atlanta area. For the past four years she has worked for HWPCo, an AV/security manufacturer rep firm. The company allows her to work remotely, and she was looking to move back to Auburn because it is closer to her family. She hopes eventually to retire there. “While my degree is in economics, all the intro courses I was required to take have helped me to contribute more broadly to the company’s operations.”

1990s

Jeff Call (’95, accounting, ’96, master of accountancy) was promoted during 2022 to managing partner of Bennett Thrasher LLP. Headquartered in Atlanta, Bennett Thrasher is the 65th largest accounting firm in the U.S. As managing partner, Call will direct the firm’s strategic plan, its growth and advancement of the firm’s culture. He started in the Big Four Accounting firms with Arthur Andersen and Deloitte and joined Bennett Thrasher in 2002 to initiate their Personal Financial Services Group. He became a partner in 2005 at age 31 and has held substantial leadership roles, serving on the board for 15 of the past 17 years. “My experience at Auburn within the accounting and master of accountancy program and Harbert College was a significant contributor in building the skills necessary for my long-term career success.”

Jan Chamblin (’99, marketing) relocated to Atlanta in 2022 to start her new role as director of development for the B.F. Lewis College of Nursing and Health Professions at Georgia State University. She is the lead fundraiser in charge of developing and executing major gift fundraising initiatives for the college. She secures gifts of $25,000 and above from alumni, friends, foundations and corporations.

Martin Fein (’93, accounting) was recently promoted to criminal administrative judge of the 17th Judicial Circuit in Florida. He will continue presiding as a career criminal trial unit judge and will also supervise 22 criminal divisions and 20 trial judges. The 17^th Judicial Circuit is based in Fort Lauderdale and currently serves more than 2 million citizens. He was appointed to the Circuit Court bench in 2016 by then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott. Before that he was in private practice. “Hard work, thorough preparation and always exceeding clients’ expectations are some of the skills learned while studying accounting at Auburn that led to my professional success.”

Leah Jones (’92, accounting) was named CFO of Veradigm, formerly Allscripts Healthcare, where she has been employed for the past 14 years, in May 2022. In October she was named Woman of the Year in Mathematics by the Women in Technology Organization in Atlanta. “Auburn taught me to learn, to be courageous, and to always remember the Southern way of doing things — with respect, professionalism and a huge dose of Southern charm. Building trust and maintaining a winning attitude that I learned at Auburn have fueled my career and will continue to be a huge foundation to my continued achievements.”

Jennifer “Jennie” Karrels Menzie, (’93, marketing) received her JD from Vanderbilt University and her Master of Legal Studies in taxation from the University of Florida after leaving Auburn. Currently she is president and COO of Cumberland Trust, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. “I have three sons. The oldest is a sophomore at Auburn.”

Don McDaniel (’91, management) sold a refreshment services business eight years ago, then was a Realtor and real estate investor in northeast Alabama until 2022, when he moved to Orange Beach, Alabama. He now works mostly with out-of-town buyers who want to purchase second homes, short-term rentals, and investment properties along Alabama’s Gulf Coast.

Glenn Mitchell (’93, accounting) was recently named to the GeorgiaTrend.com website’s inaugural “Georgia 500 2022: Georgia’s Most Influential Leaders” for his work as office managing partner of EY, Atlanta.

J. Don Overton (’92, finance) was appointed by the National Association of Home Builders to a second term on the National Legal Action Committee and was re-appointed to the Board of Trustees for the Multi-Family Housing Council for 2023. He was appointed chair of the Single Family Built-for-Rent Working Group for the National Association of Home Builders for 2023/2024. He is principal of Terra Verde LLC of Little Rock, Arkansas, a developer of single-family, built-to-rent developments across Arkansas and the Mid-South. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, teaching a senior-level course in Construction Contracts and Law.

David Schuessler (’92, marketing) was named chief event fundraising officer for Ducks Unlimited Inc. the world’s largest wetlands and waterfowl conservation organization.

Tony Truitt (’90, finance) is host of a radio show called “Truitt News Radio” on Birmingham’s Talk 99.5 every Saturday morning. The show is also being broadcast on FM 106.5 in Mobile.

2000s

Alyson Burkett (’09, economics) established a new financial planning practice in 2022 with her spouse, Brian. Together they created 21 Goats Financial Planning in Roswell, Georgia. She earned the CFPA designation in March 2022. When they created their practice, the objective was to make financial planning fun for millennials, Gen X, and women business owners. “I knew after the career help I got at Harbert College that I had to work in financial services with clients.”

Justin Conrey (’04, finance) took over in October 2022 as president/CEO of CU Business Group, a Portland, Oregon-based credit union service organization that supports more than 660 credit unions with commercial lending services in 48 states, including Alabama. He has worked in the banking industry since graduating from Auburn and managed commercial lending departments at credit unions and served as a chief credit officer at a community bank in the Northeast. “My experiences at Auburn have truly shaped who I am as a person, leader, and father. The Auburn family instills great character, and I work every day to live the Auburn Creed.”

Scott Geller (’05, MBA) recently celebrated the third anniversary of starting his independent consulting firm offering fractional CFO services for small to mid-tier businesses. He focuses on tech, services and staffing firms, providing strategic support to help owners make informed decisions regarding the financial opportunities and challenges their businesses face. He said his firm brings the insight and expertise of a full-time CFO at a fraction of the cost. “My experience at Harbert MBA’s outreach program was fantastic, allowing me to earn my MBA while also working. The interaction with other enrollees was a great learning experience in addition to the degree.”

Steven Loosier (’08, MBA) volunteered on the Board of the Greater Nashville Auburn Club in 2020 and met “a wonderful group of fellow alumni located in middle Tennessee.” He is currently a district manager for a federal government agency. He was a claims specialist when he earned his MBA from Auburn and has held positions of increasing responsibility since graduating.

Lawrence Martin (’09, MBA) is taking on a new role as head of global cloud engineering at SAP, with teams and solutions around the globe. He started with the group about a year ago in preparation for this big move, working to align people for a cloud acceleration and transformation to open new markets. “This required all the skills across the MBA programs from financial projects, IT, leadership, etc., because you don’t lead billion-dollar initiatives without preparation. Auburn provided the foundation for this preparation.”

Catharine Montgomery (’08, marketing) reports that venture capital firm MXP Ventures has invested in her communications agency, Better Together. Better Together is a full-service, Black, woman-founded and purpose-driven public relations agency. The agency was founded with a singular goal: to support organizations that focus on making a positive impact on people by ensuring they not only talk about their desired impact but also put that talk into action. Better Together officially launched on Jan. 23. “I have joy each and every day when I am able to use my skills from the Harbert College to achieve my goals.”

Andy Redman (’02, information systems management) was recently promoted to managing director at BCG BrightHouse. His work focuses in three areas: Clarity — articulating and activating purpose, vision, mission, and values. Connection — bringing heart to engagement efforts, including recruitment campaigns and strategic communications during major transformations. Innovation — supporting leaders to step out of the day-to-day to reimagine what is possible. Since joining the firm in 2018, he has led more than 25 engagements in 10 countries. He said that his most formative experience at Auburn was doing research with Professor Chetan Sankar, including writing his honors thesis on “the efficacy of virtual vs. face-to-face teams. Very relevant nowadays.”

Martin Ross (’00, aviation management) recently joined Scout Motors, Inc. as director of product purchasing. He said he will play a pivotal role in developing a world-class supply chain for the revitalization of the iconic Scout vehicles. He joined Scout in October 2022, after working 10 years at Volkswagen Group of America. Scout is the newest brand within the Volkswagen Group, and he had the opportunity to be involved with the project at a very early phase. “I have also had the pleasure to stay connected to the university, participating in studies and speaking to students in supply chain classes. I enjoy the chance to speak directly to the students and give them some additional perspective on how they can put their education to work after graduation.”

Gordon Sumner (’06, MBA) leads the nonprofit Veterans Moving Forward, providing service dogs to veterans at no cost. He established his own consulting company, Gordon Sumner Consulting, a service for disabled veteran-owned small businesses and Native American small businesses.

Dustin Thompson (’05, marketing) stood in Victory Lane at the INDY500 last year. He led Chip Ganassi Racing’s digital marketing efforts, working closely with all the drivers on their INDYCAR, IMSA and Extreme E teams. He received an official INDY500 winner’s ring for being part of the team. Since 2005 he has worked at different advertising agencies in Atlanta, Phoenix, and Indianapolis. Before landing at Chip Ganassi Racing, he was vice president of one of Indiana’s oldest ad agencies, where he grew their digital and content capabilities. “When I started, they had zero revenue in the space. When I left, we were bringing in over a third of the revenue for the agency.”

Bill Todd (’00, MBA) recently became a Certified Digital Marketing Professional through Auburn’s Office of Professional and Continuing Education. He is president and partner of o2ideas, a longtime Birmingham PR and ad agency serving national, regional and local clients. It is a certified minority-owned business with the National Minority Supplier Development Council.

Buz Walsh (’06, MBA) is now working at Summer Classics in Pelham, Alabama, as director of global quality assurance.

2010s

Kelsey Davidson (’16, accounting) is financial manager at Auburn’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction. She and her husband have two children, William, 8, and Eloise, 4. As financial manager, she oversees finance, budget and compliance for the CADC. She loved Auburn as a student and always wanted to come back and work for the university.

Brent S. DeAngelis (’16, information systems management, ’21, MBA, ’21, MSF) spent two and a half years in the consulting industry working on audit and IT security projects before returning to Harbert for his MBA and MSF. He is currently a Level 2 candidate for the CFA designation and has been promoted to financial analyst at Best A.M., a global credit agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specializing in the insurance industry.

Jacquelyn Dolly (’19, marketing) says she had a lot of change in 2022: “I bought my first home, got engaged and began planning a wedding, got let go, and found a new job that fulfills me 10 times more than the previous one.” She is now alliance marketing manager at RDA Corp. She works with technology partners to create a cohesive and collaborative marketing plan that drives efforts and success across multiple channels.

Brock Hendon (’18, finance) received his LL.M. in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center in May 2022, and is an attorney at Rushton Stakely in Montgomery, Alabama.

Ben Hixson (’09, MBA) says “super-hot” consolidation in his industry led him to sell one of the two businesses he owned. He has taken on a regional manager position, in addition to his duties as CEO of the company he still owns. “The knowledge and experience that I gained at AU gave me the confidence to take a leap from employee to owner, a decision that has been financially rewarding and has helped me begin the path of purpose-discovery, and likely early retirement.”

Justin Holland (’11, supply chain management) recently moved to Huntsville, Alabama, to join Carter Express Inc. as director of operations providing cross-dock logistics and transportation needs for a leader in automotive manufacturing. “In my role I provide business-to-business solutions on transportation and logistics needs with 100-plus daily truck routes through a 15-person management team. My experience in the supply chain management program led me directly into the transportation industry in 2011. The Auburn University prestige is real and has propelled my career success.”

Anthony LaScalea (’10, finance) participated in Netflix’s production “Love is Blind.”

Jeremy Leff (’13, information systems management) was recently promoted to software architect at Insight. “I’ve been with Insight for about five years, a global Fortune 500 IT consulting firm with offices in nearly every major city in the world. I design cloud-based software solutions for our clients and serve as technical lead for teams of developers and engineers to implement those solutions.”

Hallie Mauldin (’17, marketing) has been working at Bank Independent in North Alabama for over a year. She has been promoted to community engagement leader. She oversees community events, sponsorship opportunities, donations, and the bank’s Helping Hands Foundation.

Logan Pack (’19, business analytics) has started a new job as a data engineer with Altec, which allowed him to work from home and move back to Auburn. “I take messy data and clean it, transform it, and store it so that we can save data scientists precious time. The reason I got this job is because of the experience I gained through working with AWS in my Big Data II class, as well as the multiple classes that I took that focused on Python development.”

Michael Pittman (’13, finance) lives in Atlanta and works for Google. “I am on the Supply Chain Finance Team and manage $9 billion of Google’s global inventory. I am also the PRIDE ERG Lead for Google. Personally, I am getting ready to complete my 52nd half marathon, one for every state plus D.C. and Puerto Rico”

Jordan Scales (’15, aviation management) is an aircraft manager for Clay Lacy Aviation. Last fall, he was recognized as a Top 40 Under 40 by the National Business Aviation Association, the governing body of the industry, and was recently named vice chairman of the NBAA Young Professionals Council.

Michael Toussaint (’16, MBA) recently started a new position as director of enterprise sales engineering for Juniper Networks. He leads the presales engineering effort in support of the sales organization in the U.S. East Region and is responsible for more than $400 million in revenue for a territory that stretches from Maine to Florida. “During the interview process, my Auburn MBA was referred to as a big plus because I was able to demonstrate expertise in business, finance, and leadership.”

Hayden Watson (’14, accounting) welcomed his second child — and hopefully future Auburn Tiger — into the world. Baylor Rose Watson was born December 22, 2022.

Robert Wiseman (’15, MBA) was recently promoted to new product development manager at Lochinvar, LLC. He works with the engineering teams to develop and introduce new products to the market. “I leverage my 12 years as a design engineer and four years in product management to help explain the complete picture to the engineers. My Auburn MBA is coming in very handy in my new managerial role.”

2020s

Abigail Alford (’22, accounting) has been studying for the CPA exam while working remotely for Heater CPA in Waxhaw, North Carolina, doing bookkeeping and tax preparation. She will start this fall with Crowe LLP in Tampa, Florida, as a staff auditor.

Greyson Bethune, ’21 accounting, works at EY in enterprise risk consulting and recently passed all four parts of the CPA exam. “It is always interesting to learn about new industries and continue to build on the cornerstone of knowledge gained during my time at Harbert College.”

Maddy Bridges (’22, information systems management) is a data analyst for the international insurance broker Gallagher, working remotely out of the Nashville office, where she was a sales intern in summer 2021. Last year, she founded a nonprofit called womANALYTICS that is dedicated to providing local Middle Tennessee students with scholarship opportunities.

Owen Bullington (’21, marketing) works for United Rentals in the mobile storage and office solutions division. He earned the top revenue in the district each of his first three months. “I always wanted to do sales and Harbert provided all the right education to help me do well.”

India Callaway (’21, finance) got her job at Fiserv during her last semester at Auburn. She has finished her first year in a financial analyst rotational program in which she assists on a team for a year and then switches to another team for the next year.

Gwen Callinan (’22, marketing) works for Putnam Investments in Boston. She passed the SIE and is currently studying for the Series 7. “My time at Harbert influenced me in my career decision in many ways. One way was to reach beyond my comfort zone.”

Emily Chiepalich (’21, supply chain management) started at Mercedes Benz US International right after graduation in May 2021. She joined the service parts supply chain team and recently began a new role in project management. “I got my job through the career office recruiting process. Auburn was able to match me with the best environment and company, as it is fast-paced and challenging, which fits my personality and work ethic perfectly.”

Carina (Whitmire) Farr (’22, marketing) is events coordinator for the College of Business at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She got married in December. “My experiences at the Harbert College of Business and on the Business Council prepared me for my career both personally and professionally. Jan Moppert in the OPCD was my go-to for everything career-related. I have gotten many compliments on my resume because of her.”

Amberlee Fisher (’22, management) has been a part of the Disney College Program since July and recently received a full-time offer. “Harbert really prepared me to be flexible, but also identify areas where I may need to help with problem-solving. Harbert also taught me some great skills in my management and marketing classes.”

Sarah Flowers (’22, management) is an HR partner for Amazon. “My position is in the field, so I work in an Amazon warehouse directly with employees. I handle employee relations, talent management, workforce planning, organizational effectiveness and more in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment. The projects that I did during my time at Harbert have helped me tackle projects at work.”

Kelly Henry (’22, business administration) is a procurement coordinator at Southeastern Grocers in Jacksonville, Florida, which is the parent company for Winn-Dixie grocery stores.

Emily Irvin (’22, finance) has completed her first semester at Mercer Law School.

Camryn Jones (’22, finance) is a financial analyst with Computer Share. “Harbert helped influence my career choices by all the career prep services they provided. The mock interview sessions helped me become more confident during my interviews.”

Amanda Krawczyk (’22, business analytics) is part of the Digital Technology Leadership Program at GE Digital. She will go through four different rotations based in information technology over the course of two years. “With my job changing every six months, I must be comfortable with continuously learning. I was always stretched to try something new in all my courses at Auburn, which has in turn made me comfortable taking on new roles during my rotational program.”

Kaylie Raines (’21, management) moved to Birmingham after graduation to start her recruiting career. In May 2021, she took a position with a local staffing agency that kickstarted her recruiting career. In January 2022, she began a position with BL Harbert International as a corporate recruiter. She supports salaried recruitment and campus recruitment efforts. “The HCOB greatly influenced my career choices by helping me understand the importance of a company’s reputation.”

Maggie Ricks (’21, accounting, ’22 master of accountancy) is a tax associate in the business tax entities group at RSM US LLP, the fifth-largest public accounting firm in the country. “I passed all four parts of the CPA Exam on the first try and have really enjoyed using that knowledge to further my work. I got my job after completing an internship with the same firm. From technical accounting to software usage to professionalism, it is well known at my firm that Harbert graduates have a leg up on everyone else due to the curriculum and networking provided at Auburn.”

Cole Rothrock (’21, business administration) started a drywall repair business, The Patch Boys of North Atlanta, which is now the highest-rated drywall company in Georgia. “While at Auburn, I had many professors tell me how I should chase my entrepreneurial dream.”

Maddy Selesky (’22, supply chain management) is an analyst in the Supply Chain Development Program at Tractor Supply Company. “I am excited to transition into a permanent seat at my company after completion of the program.”

Hope Sharp (’22, marketing) is marketing director for a digital agency in Columbus, Georgia. She runs all the marketing efforts for the agency, such as branding, lead generation, paid advertising and social media.

Hannah Lee Weaver (’22, marketing) is a social media manager at Sway Social, an influencer brand management company in Nashville, Tennessee. “We work with all social media platforms and have a roster of clients from celebrities to everyday Instagram influencers. My main tasks are creating strategies, negotiating brand deals and content creation. Auburn’s marketing program set me up for complete success in this new, ever-changing industry.”

Herb White (’20, MBA) was recently promoted to president/CEO of Sharonview Federal Credit Union.

Table of Contents

Theme

Research

How We Think

Spotlight

Features

Alumni Notes

Theme

Are You Ready To Step Into The Ring?

A More Favorable Sales Experience

Rural Telemedicine Use Remains As Pandemic Fades

Auditors Must Maintain Intense Skepticism

What’s Behind A Buy Late, Sell Early Stock Strategy

Taking a hike, literally or figuratively, really helps

View Uncertainty As An Opportunity For Growth

This Generation can Make sustainability pay off

Keep Branding Strategy Foremost in Mind

Conversations From The C-Suite

Dabsey Maxwell

The Sweet Science

Business, boxing and training for uncertainty

Be The One Who Creates Uncertainty

Modern Day Canaries In The Coal Mine

Stay attuned to the first signs of trouble

Darn.

Unraveling the inevitable tangles in the supply chain

Reading Into The Future

Without a digital strategy, success is not in the cards

Batten Down The Hatches

Engage your employees to help steer through the storm

Alumni Notes

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s